The Toronto Maple Leafs have become an exercise in excuses

The Toronto Maple Leafs have become an exercise in excuses

TORONTO —Luke Schenn walked out in a white shirt and a blue tie and black overcoat and he looked directly into the cameras and said, “I got no excuse for it. It’s just a bad play.” The slow start? “That’s obviously my fault,” he said. “One hundred percent, I’ll take the blame for that.”

His nose might be perpetually crooked, just around the bridge, but Schenn told it straight.

The directness was jarring, if only because that’s not standard operating practice around here these days. It doesn’t matter that Brian Burke didn’t make a big move at the NHL trade deadline, because almost nobody made a big move at the NHL trade deadline. If you want to criticize the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, then the NHL’s Cold War deadline is not the place to start. Or to finish, either.

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But as this season has skidded onto yet another ledge, next to yet another early April abyss, this organization has become an exercise in excuses, in misdirection and in incoherence. Tuesday’s wet cardboard box of a game, a 5-3 loss to the Florida Panthers, gave the Leafs a 1-8-1 record in its last 10 games. There is still time to pull out of the dive, and make the playoffs.

But right now, this team looks doomed. Dumb penalties, frozen hands, wooden skates, and a goaltender who is still not what he once was. As Schenn put it, “We’re embarrassed to go out there and play like that in front of our home fans, and get booed in our own building.”

And just like that, there are no excuses left. At the morning skate, coach Ron Wilson had crowed that “all these rumours the last couple weeks have shown that they were nothing but rumours,” as if it wasn’t Burke who took to the radio last week to say he was looking for a goaltender. All these rumours, as if it wasn’t someone with the Leafs who leaked the fact the team had an offer for pending free agent Mikhail Grabovski.

Burke, of course, also claimed fans don’t like Wilson because he doesn’t kiss up to the media, which really explains those “FI-RE WIL-SON!” chants Tuesday night. And Wilson was the one strapping explosives to Jonas Gustavsson and James Reimer in public, day after day. Oh, and the trade deadline stuff. You want a confidence shaker, it’s not Darren Dreger and Bob McKenzie.

“I think the trade deadline is hard on players, but I think it’s murder on players in Toronto,” Burke said Monday. “And we just had a serious debate whether next year we’re going to do this 10 days earlier so the players can relax.”

The pressure of the trade deadline? Really? This is Toronto, for God’s sake. Burke knew the moment he took this job what he had to build, and what kind of players were required to build it, and four years later this is a viable excuse? Schenn was asked if this team was fragile right now, and he said, “I don’t think guys are feeling unbelievable about themselves, that’s for sure.”

But if that’s a media creation, then pack up the whole crew and start again. Free of the deadline, the Leafs spotted their opponent a 2-0 lead for the fifth consecutive game, this time in the first 2:21. Good thing the trade deadline had passed, though, or it surely would have been even worse. Perhaps a Leaf would have collided with a NASCAR jet drying truck.

Burke has worked in one of Canada’s hockey boiler rooms before, and he railed against the entitlement of blue-and-white disease from the moment he got here, and he knows better. He has always tried to eradicate excuses for losing, to the point that he claimed Martin Gerber off waivers at the end of the lost 2008-09 season. It meant drafting seventh instead of, say, in the top five, and may still be the most inexplicable move Burke has ever made.

And now, with a team in crisis and a tumbleweed-filled trade deadline, the coach is declared safe, and it’s the trade deadline’s fault. Oh, save us. Blaming the media is a tired, reflexive tactic for this organization. It’s a sideshow. In the month of February, with the dreaded pressures of the trade deadline coming to bear across the country, how did teams react? Leaving aside the Canucks, who are in a separate category from the rest of Canada, the Calgary Flames and Winnipeg Jets maintained their playoff bubble status by earning 15 points apiece; Ottawa recorded 16 points; Edmonton garnered 13. Even Montreal, where the flames have consumed most of the franchise, had 11.

Toronto has managed nine.

It’s not just this year, though. Every year Burke has aimed for the playoffs, and it hasn’t happened yet. If it wasn’t a five-year rebuild before, it may be now. There are two teams that have not reached the post-season since the lockout. One is Toronto. The other is Florida. Who would you bet on, at the moment?

“That’s on our résumé,” first-year Panthers coach Kevin Dineen said. “We’ve been looked at as a team that hasn’t been, say, what Nashville has done. You know, year after year they find a way to get it done, and we haven’t been there.

“But that’s part of the fun of being in the job, is to go out there and set the pace and have a chance of being … what I like to say is we want to be relevant when things come around in April, when you’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, you’re right in the thick of things.”

That’s what Toronto wants, too, but it’s slipping further and further away. This organization has escaped competitive relevance for so long now, and as it happens again the excuses come to bear. Well, save it. The next 19 games are not just a referendum on the goaltending, on the defencemen, on the forwards, on the coach. They’re yet another referendum on Burke, who lords over this entire operation. This is Toronto. Nobody should act surprised.